Sega's Crazy Taxi Reverse Engineered For Free Roam In Browser
Will shared the first part of his process breakdown.
SEGA may be planning a reboot of Crazy Taxi, but the original has long earned a place in history, and a developer known as wretched.computer aka Will, has ensured its preservation on noclip.website, a "digital museum of video game levels".
You can explore it yourself: click the link and use WASD and your mouse to freely fly around the game's levels. The mouse wheel adjusts camera speed, and holding Shift doubles your movement speed.
This website truly acts as a museum, as its codebase is an open-source recreation of each of those games' original rendering methods. Adding a game to noclip involves reverse engineering and rebuilding large parts of its code, from creating custom parsers for unique file formats to reconstructing rendering loops that mimic the original game engine, and sometimes even re-creating elements of the AI and gameplay mechanics.
That's what makes this Crazy Taxi project so fascinating. Even better, the developer has shared a detailed blog post explaining the process and giving others the tools to do the same.
Crazy Taxi
It's important to note that there are multiple versions of Crazy Taxi, and Will focused on the GameCube version. For this, he employed the Dolphin emulator, ImHex, Ghidra, and noclip.website itself. You can read about the first steps here, with future parts coming soon. Will's goal is to explain the process of reverse engineering in an instructive way, so that anyone with a basic understanding of programming can follow along.
For now, take a few minutes explore the games on noclip, freely flying through 3D spaces you last saw as a kid is a real treat.
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